


because i am done with my graceless heart, so tonight i’m gonna cut it out and then restart

by goreds



Category: Bellevue (TV)
Genre: F/M, Not Incest, Post-Canon Fix-It, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, also this is a fic for like two other people, talk of psychiatric commitment, this was a cheery show
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2019-12-02
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:27:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21645985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goreds/pseuds/goreds
Summary: Post-series finale. Peter Welland is pretty messed up after Annie Ryder leaves the town of Bellevue, after everything that's happened.But she comes back. Eventually.
Relationships: Annie Ryder/Peter Welland
Comments: 6
Kudos: 13





	because i am done with my graceless heart, so tonight i’m gonna cut it out and then restart

**Author's Note:**

> TW for self-harm and discussions of death, which is actually tamer than you'd expect from this show.

So he doesn’t tell her. He wants to scream, yell, kick things, maybe just crash his SUV into a tree.

But Annie didn’t want to hear that from him. He’s pretty sure she had it figured out, anyways.

Peter’s going to worry about her for the rest of his life, however long that is, and all because he fucked everything up. She leaves with Eddie, and her daughter, to make a new life. What does he have? He’s the police chief, which he guesses means something. Lily would probably sleep with him still. Not that he wants to sleep with Lily. _At all_. Never did. Truth be told, he’s a little scared of her. Well, a lot scared of her.

He goes back to his big, empty house, and looks at the burnt down shed, and wishes he hadn’t gotten distracted by the truth and had just shot Adam outright. In the church, through the confessional screen. Or that he hadn’t let Adam get into his head, that he had dragged Adam into the woods and put him down. Maybe Sandy’s death had been a mercy killing. Adam was still a sick fucking SoB.

Peter goes into his house, and he can almost feel it shake as he slams the front door behind him. He finds himself sliding down and sitting against the door, breathing shallow. He can feel the tears that he had held back from Annie coming now, and he just starts sobbing.

Annie’s gone. She’s not coming back. He tried his best.

No, he knows he really didn’t. Annie, with her teeth gap and her dirty blonde hair and her bright eyes and her smile that was all too rare. She was lost to him now. She was all he had really loved in the world. He tried his best to take care of her. He wonders if that was because he blamed himself for her father’s death and tried to be father _and_ brother to her simultaneously. But he never wanted to be her father, and her relationship with her brother was _fucked_ , so he didn’t want that either.

He just wanted to be hers.

Eventually, he gets off the floor, stops sobbing and goes to the kitchen, passing a mirror along the way. He looks terrible. Eyes red, face moist from snot, still raggedly breathing. He hadn’t told Annie just _where_ he’d been in the aftermath of Adam’s death. He’d wanted her to be safe, and he wasn’t sure he was good for her at the time. And then he saw where she’d hurt herself, and well...why wasn’t he there when she needed him most?

Oh, right. Because he had discreetly checked himself into a psychiatric ward a few towns over, where no one knew he was the police chief, where they would probably keep him off the books. Where no one could gossip about him. He did it because he was starting to feel just like Annie’s father had just before he went into the woods to his cabin and put a shotgun in his mouth. Peter felt like he had ruined Annie. Not just Annie, but her father too. He still felt guilty about what happened with Lily. He’d die guilty.

The ward had been typical, just like the one in Bellevue. Bad food, not great care, but adequate time to get himself out of whatever awful mindset he had found himself in this time. It worked. Until just now. Everything felt like it was crashing down again, but worse this time.

He grabs a beer from the fridge and starts drinking it. And drinking it. Before he realizes it, he’s finished the bottle. He stares at the bottle briefly before screaming and smashing it on the floor. And then he’s on the floor again, back against the fridge this time. His heart is racing so fast he thinks it’s going to stop. That’d be nice. Just a peaceful fucking heart attack. He looks at the glass on the floor. He considers it.

Then he picks up a piece. Feels an edge with his finger. It’s fucking sharp, and a little cut appears. He squeezes his finger and blood comes out, little by little. He takes off his coat and rolls up the sleeve of his sweater. He wonders...he wonders if he can ever understand how Annie feels when she hurts herself.

He slices into a non-essential part of his forearm and watches the blood come forth. It feels...good. He knows that’s just endorphins, that’s just his brain trying to figure out what the hell he’s doing. Maybe it’s also a byproduct of the beer he chugged.

“Is this why you did it, Annie?” He says to the air.

He looks down at his arm. “Shit.” He applies pressure to the self-inflicted wound. Staggers to his feet and walks over to the cabinet where he keeps bandages, his shoes crunching the rest of the glass. He supposes he’ll have to clean that up. At some point. He gets the supplies and cleans the wound. The antiseptic stings, and the cut hurts. It aches. He wraps a bandage around the area and looks at the kitchen floor, covered in glass still. He grunts.

Peter eventually cleans up the floor. He’s still on a sabbatical from the police department, so he mostly spends time at his house, usually staring out the window, trying to will Eddie’s dumb red truck into existence on the road that runs by the house.

Lily comes by at some point, he assumes to thank him for saving her wretched life, but he doesn’t answer the door. He only knows it’s her because he can hear her voice calling to him from the other side of the door.

He doesn’t go outside after a while. Oh, he keeps the house tidy...himself, not so much, but he doesn’t feel like going anywhere anyway.

He keeps hurting himself, feeling like one of the emo teenage high school students Bellevue has. Annie had a brief emo phase, he remembers with a smile. Of course, the cutting pre-dated that, and post-dated it too.

At some point, Lily comes by and tells him through the door he’s not the police chief any longer. Apparently, there was a special election. He really does not fucking care. He doesn’t answer her. The only reason anyone knows he’s alive is because...

Well, he doesn’t actually know if anyone thinks he’s alive anymore. Maybe they think he shot himself in his house, like Annie’s father, but with no little girl to traumatize. But no one comes to investigate him.

The self-inflicted scars start to fade, so he just reopens the old wounds. Peter doesn’t want to heal.

And then, she comes back. She bangs on his door, but he ignores it initially. Lily has taken to coming by to “check” on him. She’s doing a piss poor job, he reflects. Or maybe it’s his former force, coming to see if their ex-boss is dead.

But then he hears _her_. “Goddammit, Peter, answer the fucking door!”

So he does. His appearance, which he assumes must be fairly haggard, doesn’t seem to phase her. He knows she’s seen worse.

“Peter,” she says with a curt nod.

“Annie,” he replies, his heart feeling like it might burst out of his chest.

“Can I come in?”

He moves aside to let her in.

She looks around, seemingly satisfied that he’s not living in total squalor, despite his appearance. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“Just living. It’s a free country.”

“You lost your _job_.”

“I didn’t really want it anymore. Everything kind of took the fun out of it.” He’s getting snarky, and he hates that. But it or rage is really all he knows.

“You’ve grown a beard--”

“I’m experimenting with it.”

“Fine, whatever. You never answer your fucking door, you never go outside--”

“What, for fucking Lily? I’m not going to answer the door for that manipulative cu--”

“Is she the only one who’s come to visit you?” This is purely a question. Annie doesn’t know.

“Yes.”

“Bellevue was never very loyal to its finest.”

“No.”

He realizes too late his sleeves are rolled up--he was doing the dishes. She catches his arms. Looks at the scars in horror.

“What the _fuck_.”

“It’s nothing you haven’t seen before.”

“Not on you, Peter.” She’s choked up.

He tries to shut the conversation down. “Look, I’m glad you came to visit, but I don’t think we should--"

“Did you really check yourself into a ward in Keystone? After Adam’s death?”

This takes him aback. “How did you--”

“I’m still a detective, jackass. I wanted to know why you left me on my own before trying to confess...to confess--”

“Yeah?” He’s getting angry now.

“Confess that you were in love with me and that you always have been, you sick fuck.”

So she did know. And she just left. Left him all alone. But he also doesn’t really have anything to retort back. No, now he finds himself sliding down the wall and landing on the floor. _She knows._

Annie stands above him, looking at him curiously. “Are you...having a panic attack?”

“Yeah, turns out being left all fucking alone does that to a person.” He’s mad, and he’s having a panic attack. Well, it’s a unique experience, anyways.

She sits down next to him and takes one of his hands, squeezing it. “Just breathe.”

He leans his head against the wall...how many times in the months following her departure has he imagined something like this? But he does find himself breathing.

She releases her hold on his hand and rolls up one of her sleeves. Vertical scars, red and angry.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispers.

“You were right. For once. It didn’t get better. Turns out when you’re as fucked up as we are, moving away from your problems just make them worse.”

“Annie, I--”

“Shhh...breathe.” She leans her head against his shoulder.

They sit there for what feels like an indeterminable amount of time. Just breathing, their scars out for all the world to see.

“Eddie took Daisy when he saw I wasn’t getting any better. I get text messages from Daisy sometimes.”

“Bastard.”

“He doesn’t want her turning out like me.”

“Of course not. He’s a smart guy, but he doesn’t understand how any of this really works.”

“Do you?”

“Not really, I guess.”

She chuckles at that. Annie stands and offers a hand to Peter. He stands up, his legs still shaking a little. Annie looks him dead in the eye. “What did Adam tell you? Word for word. I get the feeling you remember.”

He does, because of course he does. He always will. “He said, ‘You love her. You’ve loved her ever since she was a kid. And you’ve just been waiting and waiting and waiting for her to grow up, so you can just…” He trails off...he knows what Adam _meant_ at the end, but not precisely what he was planning on saying.

“‘So you can just...?”

“Just have her, is what I think he was getting at.”

“Have you really loved me since I was a kid?”

“Since I met you.”

She chuckles somewhat mirthlessly. “That’s kind of sick, Peter.”

“I wasn’t expecting any of what happened next to happen. I thought your father would live forever. I thought you’d be fine. I thought it’d pass at the time. And then things went to hell and it just...didn’t.”

“I never thought of you as a father figure.”

“Oh? That’s somewhat nice to know.”

“I think I realized I loved you back in high school.”

“What?”

“You hid it well, but somehow I just...knew. But then Eddie happened and Daisy was born, and... I stopped. Just decided to be one of your officers, one of your employees, and let the feelings pass.”

He’s still hung up on the fact that she just admitted that she’s in love with him too. Or that she was. So he says nothing, just letting her speak.

“And then Jesse was killed and Adam came back and I...I...I realized that you were the one I wanted. Not Eddie. Certainly not Brady. But then I found out you were sleeping with Lily and I had to shoot Adam and you disappeared and I just wanted to be...left alone.”

“So that’s why you left.”

“Yes, Peter. That’s why I left.”

“I never stopped loving you,” he hears himself say raspily.

“I’m glad someone didn’t.”

“Annie...”

“Yes?”

And for the first time, they kiss. Annie recoils for a moment.

“I don’t like the beard.”

“It’s not a permanent fixture.”

“Thank fucking God.” And she kisses him again, deeply.

They break apart. Annie rests her head on his chest and just holds on. And they just stay in an embrace for a while, taking in one another for the first time.


End file.
